Monday, 30 November 2015

The
last time the global community tried to take collective action on
climate change – in 2009 in Copenhagen – the world’s leaders
finally came to agree that every not-too-onerous effort should be
made to hold global warming to 2°C above the pre-industrial average.
At Copenhagen, the Small Island Developing States (SIDs) and Least
Developed Countries (LDCs) raised their concerns that their very
survival would depend on a 1.5°C
upper limit. The world promised to look into that.

So far, the scientists
appointed to look into it – they’re fetchingly called the
Structured Expert Dialogue (SED) – have found that yes indeed, the
2°C limit is too warm for many of the world’s vulnerable
eco-systems and regions, and a 1.5°C limit would be significantly
safer. Devising policies that will achieve anything like those
targets is the challenge now facing the delegates to the climate
change conference in Paris that kicks off on November 30. Luckily for
planet Earth, this process will not depend on New Zealand leading the
way. Why do I say that? At
Paris, all 150 participant countries nations will have put forward
their pledges (they’re called Intended Nationally Determined
Contributions or INDCs) that set out how they plan to combat climate
change. In early July 2015, New Zealand tabled its INDC target which
is to cut emissions by a paltry 11% on 1990 levels, by 2030. On the
information available, this is the second weakest contribution ( next
to that of Canada’s previous government) of
any nation in the developed world.Now
that Canada’s new leaders have announced a firm commitment to
climate change action, New Zealand will be heading into the Paris
conference at the very bottom of the class among developed countries,
and with the trends heading in the wrong direction. On current
settings, New Zealand’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions will
surpass those of the United States by 2025. As the authoritative
Climate Action Tracker site stated
in its analysis of our INDC paper:

“If most other
countries were to follow New Zealand’s approach, global warming
would exceed 3–4°C ; a world that would see oceans acidifying,
coral reefs dissolving, sea levels rising rapidly, and more than 40%
species extinction.”

True, as Climate
Action Tracker concedes, there is as yet no cost-effective solution
available for New Zealand’s farm-based methane emissions. (Nitrous
oxide emissions from fertilisers, everything else associated with
intensive dairying are a quite different saga of culpable neglect.)
Also, the main growth in New Zealand’s emissions since 1990 has
occurred in transport, energy use in manufacturing and other areas of
the economy – but without the New Zealand government making any
substantive policy response. Climate Action Tracker again : There are virtually
no policies in place to address the fastest-growing sources of
emissions in New Zealand from transport and industrial sources, which
comprise over 50% of the growth in emissions (excluding forestry) in
New Zealand since 1990.

Luckily for New
Zealand, we’ll be only a small fish in a very big pond in Paris.
Individual nations will not be taken aside and pilloried for their
(lack of) action and ambition at this conference. Moreover, despite
our purely nominal response to what is a global problem, New Zealand
seems likely to be heavily involved in the politicking surrounding at
the Paris meeting. Under the so-called ‘New Zealand proposal,’
nations will be asked from the outset to embrace purely
voluntary targets with a promise to review their progress at some
future date. To Greens co-leader
James Shaw, this – in effect – amounts to conceding defeat before
the starting gun. “It is a case of claiming credit for taking the
lowest common denominator approach. [Climate Change Minister] Tim
Groser’s approach has been to propose a completely flaccid
agreement, which is non-binding. Individual countries pledge what
they think they can do and at some future point they’ll merely be
asked : ‘Hey, how ya doin’? Like to do a bit more ? Maybe a bit
less?’”

In practice, this
level of pragmatism puts New Zealand at some risk. Few other
countries have based their tourism brand on claiming to be
environmentally pure and eco-responsible. At Paris, the spotlight
will be on what steps countries are willing to take for planetary
health and survival. To be seen as dragging our feet and being
ultra-pragmatic at the world’s premier attempt to combat global
warming involves taking a huge economic – and moral – risk. On
RNZ’s Insight programme about the Paris conference earlier
this month, Adrian Macey – New Zealand’s former climate
change ambassador and former chief trade negotiator – outlined what
he expected the main outcome in Paris would be. Macey envisaged a
core legal agreement – which would be, he said, legally binding –
sitting alongside the INDC targets put forward by each country. These
voluntary targets will be subject to regular review, and measured
against the 2°C target. Don’t get your hopes
up about the “legally binding” bit. Anything decided at Paris
will only be ’ binding” under international law, which is more
like the rules of love than your mortgage contract with the bank.
Meaning : if you act like a climate change cad after Paris, you may
feel bad and could well cop a lot of dirty looks, but you won’t be
subject to any formal penalties that you can’t walk away from. Macey confirmed as
much to Werewolf. So.. Paris won’t be looking to create a
binding, sanction-backed regime ? “ No, clearly not,” Macey
relied, “ That’s a difference between Kyoto and the Paris
agreement. Binding sanction-backed regimes do not have the slightest
chance of being the result from Paris. You need to look no further
than the fact such a regime is unacceptable to the largest
[greenhouse] gas emitters…”

So, what kind of item
is likely to find its way into the core agreement ? Only the Mom &
apple pie stuff, it would seem. As Macey says, this part of the Paris
deal won’t be much different from what’s already in the Climate
Change Convention and/or Kyoto Protocol, save that the level of
stabilising emissions will probably be formally quantified as at the
2 degree level. Unlike James Shaw, Macey feels positive about the “
New Zealand proposal” being peddled by Tim Groser. What mystifies
Macey is how New Zealand got to claim IP rights on what is, in his
view, a pretty obvious idea – namely, to keep the various INDCs
separate from the core legal treaty. To Macey – and to
Groser – this route recognises the realpolitik of the
situation. A year ago, China and the United States reached a landmark
– and voluntary – deal to limit emissions. In Paris. China would
almost certainly never agree to be legally bound by specific targets,
and the US Congress would hardly endorse a one-sided binding target
for the US, without China doing likewise. No, Macey doesn’t buy the
Greens argument that New Zealand has prematurely helped set the bar
at Paris far too low, right from the start. Macey:
“We really needed some framework for an acceptable outcome.
Otherwise, [as at Copenhagen] the core of the negotiations could get
totally bogged down in detail.” Shouldn’t the delegates have been
put under a bit of pressure to angst over the issue of binding
targets? “Well, then you would have less time to develop the
transparency and accountability regime. You had to leave behind that
binding/non binding ambiguity and – as Tim Groser says – get
everyone on the bus first.” Even if out in the real world, this
could well mean that everyone else misses the bus on climate change. Where Macey does feel
genuinely critical of the New Zealand government is over its
all-too-evident unwillingness to conduct an informed public debate,
or to be transparent about the modeling and reasoning that has gone
into formulating New Zealand’s INDC position. These are major
failings, he believes, in a process where the accountability
mechanisms – such as they are – depend totally on transparency.
Macey’s blog post criticisms of this point can
be found here.

Well… does the
government actually want an informed public debate, or is it
more interested in using secrecy as a tool to manage the politics of
climate change – much as it has done with the TPP ? Macey answers
only obliquely, by pointing to procedures in train that are soon
likely to force the hand of central government. Namely : next year’s
review of the Emissions Trading Scheme. Also : the pace of
technological change, which is making climate- friendly practices
more readily affordable. And finally, Macey has encountered a growing
sense in business – and it would seem, among exporters in European
markets – that we have to lift our game on climate change. “They’re
looking for more from central government.”

Meanwhile, New Zealand
is taking an INDC to Paris that may not even be legally valid. It
proposes to use accounting – and access to greenhouse gas credits –
available only to signatories to Kyoto’s second round. Problem
being, New Zealand didn’t sign up to the second round. This problem
crops up at the end of Climate Action Tracker’s damning analysis of
the New Zealand INDC:

• Based on
current policies NZ emissions per capita, while likely to remain
stable at around 17 tonnes of CO2e per person (or decrease slightly),
are set to surpass those of the US by around 2025. US per capita
emissions in 2012 were 20.6 tonnes of CO2e per person and decreasing
steadily. This reflects the underlying reality that while the United
States is taking action on climate change with a wide range of
policies, New Zealand has few policies in place to cut emissions, and
has no emissions cap in its domestic Emission Trading System (ETS).

•
If New Zealand applies
the rules it is proposing to use after 2020 to account for its Kyoto
surplus and forestry credits, its overall agriculture, energy, waste
and industrial greenhouse gas emissions could increase to 11% above
1990 levels by 2030;

• New Zealand’s
proposed 2030 INDC target is not on a direct path to its 50%
reduction by 2050 goal, unlike other major economies such as the EU
and the USA. But New Zealand’s 2050 goal is also insufficient, and
would require a 45% reduction by 2030 below 2005 levels (30% below
1990).

• There are
virtually no policies in place to address the fastest-growing sources
of emissions in New Zealand from transport and industrial sources,
which comprise over 50% of the growth in emissions (excluding
forestry) in New Zealand since 1990.

• While New
Zealand has not agreed to accept a legally binding commitment for the
Kyoto Protocol’s second commitment period, yet it appears to be
planning to apply accounting rules that carry over surplus units from
the first commitment period. This is something that is available to
countries with commitments under the second commitment period of the
Kyoto Protocol, but not those without a commitment, like New Zealand.
The legal basis upon which New Zealand is seeking to rely upon these
accounting rules is therefore unclear. So we’re aiming to
use credits to which we’re not entitled, to enable us to proceed on
a business-as-usual basis during the 2020-2030 period. The sleight of
hand involved is all but acknowledged by the wording in the New
Zealand INDC document – which says the New Zealand position is only
provisional pending “full and final agreement on the accounting
rules/guidelines to apply” to the accounting rules for the land
sector and access to carbon markets, or “ confirmation in Paris
that accounting rules agreed post-Paris will not be applied
retroactively.” Meaning: if Paris proves to be a stickler on the
greenhouse gas accounting rules, then (a) we won’t be held to our
own INDC commitments, and (b) if Paris sets new rules that allow us
to proceed as planned, it had better not impose retrospective
penalties for how we’ve bent the rules. That, at least, is
what Dr Marcia Rocha from Climate Analytics seems to be saying :
“Unusually, New Zealand’s INDC is stated as being provisional
pending confirmation in or after Paris of the accounting rules for
the land sector and access to carbon markets. However, New Zealand
may struggle to secure the rules that it needs to allow its emissions
to continue increasing, which raises another question: what would New
Zealand’s target be if its preferred rule-set fails to
materialise?” Good question. So,
who will be the main players in Paris ? Sweden is being touted
as a likely go-between in the dealings between the main emitters, and
the developing world. Reportedly, Sweden has promised about $US580
million over four years to the Green Climate Fund, which is set to
become a conduit of more than $100 billion a year in aid for
developing nations by 2020, from public and private sources in First
World economies. At 55 pages, the
conference basic negotiating document in Paris is smaller than the
300 page behometh that finally sank Copenhagen. Even so, it
won’t be plain sailing:

“A lot of
ministers are not happy that the text is so full of brackets so close
to the meeting,” Sweden’s Environment Minister Asa Romson told
reporters late on Monday as ministers gathered for warm-up talks. An
updated draft text of an accord has whittled down a final text by
about half to cover 55 pages, but it still has 1,490 brackets marking
points of disagreement and remains far longer than hoped.

To date, a chronic
difficulty has been that climate mitigation is still widely seen to
be the enemy of poverty reduction, which largely depends on policies
that promote economic growth. Recently though, a convergence of sorts
has been occurring between the developed and developing world on the
need for collective action – driven in part by the evidence on
where the rapid growth in emissions in currently coming from : Between 1850 and
2012, the United States and Europe produced 45% of greenhouse gases
currently in the atmosphere, compared to 18% from China and India,
according to the non-profit organization Climate Analytics. Based on
current practices, it is projected that by 2020, China alone will
produce 24% of global greenhouse gas emissions, India 7% the United
States 13% and the European Union 8% Climate change action by China
and India is now critical.

The November 2014
voluntary accord between the US and China, and the China/India
emissions reduction negotiations this year are steps in recognition
of this situation. Probably too late and too little, but not
inevitably the case. The feasible outcome from Paris, Macey believes,
will be a system to ensure that the greenhouse gas inventories of
countries are accurate and verifiable by the global policeman on such
matters – which happens to be the Secretariat for the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. As genuine global
and/or regional emissions trading schemes begin to emerge during the
next decade, they will set a realistic price on carbon – and in all
lielhoodf, this will well north of the $50 a ton that the Treasury
calculate its estimates for New Zealand. It will then be up to
the UNFCCC to determine for instance – where the credits being
claimed are real, and not the junk 20 cents a ton variety. Double
counting is also an issue., Macey points out. “ If I buy some units
friom Burkina Faso and count them against my targets, I don’t want
Burkina Faso to be claiming them as well.” All of this sounds
like a response – and a system – that’s going to be far too
slow for those Pacific islands sinking beneath the rising sea, or for
those countries being battered by hyper-cyclones. Macey can see the
problem. At Paris, he says, there will be a lot of talk – and cost
analysis – of the co-operation required on mitigation and
adaptation, on transfer of technology, capacity building and loss and
damage : “Countries will be expecting compensation for
extreme events…” Naturally, Macey adds
by way of an aside, New Zealand tends to focus on what global warming
and rising sea levels may do to the Pacific. This recent report by
Jan Wright, the Environment Commissioner, is a sober and balanced
assessment of how and where New Zealand cities, transport links and
low lying regions stand to be affected by
a fairly modest rise in sea levels.

Yet
in Vietnam and in Bangladesh, Macey continues, the people those who
stand to be affected (by rising sea levels) number in the tens of
millions, and not just the hundreds of thousands at risk in the
Pacific. At Paris, the world can’t afford to be complacent about
muddling though somehow. “We can’t assume that if it looks like
we’re going to miss the target….we’ll go and help you build
higher sea walls. We need to get this stuff done.”

Finally, the ordinary
observer could be forgiven for feeling someewhat confused about where
New Zealand is positioned with respect to stands on climate change in
the decade to come. In one scenario, we will be entering the post
2020 period buoyed by credits ( however dubiously acquired)
sufficient to enable business as usual – especially given that
technological change ( Electric cars ! Methane- reduction science !)
may well appear over the horizon soon enough to save our bacon.

In the other less
cheery scenario, we enter the 2020s with the prospect of the mass
harvesting of the trees on which our carbon credits have hitherto
depended – and where the foreign private owners of our forests may
not be all that interested in funding a replanting programme timed to
co-incide with our de-carbonisation needs. If we’re lucky, we may
get a greenlight from the UNFCCC to “smooth out” the gap between
the looming credit losses now, and any replanting due onstream in the
distant future. In which case – and in any case – New Zealand
would still have to spend large amounts of taxpayer money pre 2030 to
buy the necessary offsets on the currently non-existent international
market. (There’s an underlying assumption that a global ETS – or
a sizeable regional one – will be up and running by 2030.)

Does it really
matter which scenario is more likely to play out in the decade
2020-2030? Within a scheme of greenhouse gas reduction that remains
voluntary, the potential costs – however huge they may be on paper
– are at crunch, only theoretical. If we can grin and bear the
reputational damage, we could always choose – come 2030, to walk
away from our INDC provisions if the economic cost of them ends up
looking exorbitant. In doing so, we’d be pretty confident that the
rest of the world would be doing likewise, if faced with a
similar-sized bill for its climate change commitments. That’s the problem
with the Paris conference. While it busily sets itself to devise a
new set of accounting systems for greenhouse gas emissions, the level
of gross emissions in the real world appears set to keep on rising –
at a rate which will be checked by politicians only to the degree
required to allay the extremes of public concern. Tragically, that’s
not going to be enough, soon enough, to save the regions and species
currently at risk.Footnote One:
The review of our Emissions Trading Scheme referred to above by
Adrian Macey has now begun, and agriculture has been omitted from its
ambit. According to Tim Groser this is because there is as yet no
affordable way of dealing with this country’s farm-based emissions.

Critics point out that
(a) methane is not the only source of our farm-based emissions, (b)
that a realistic carbon price signal to farmers is needed to tackle
the
land compaction and water pollution problems caused by intensive
dairying and (c) without agriculture being in the frame, New
Zealand is willfully refusing to devise a means of coping with the
source of nearly half of its greenhouse gas emissions. Footnote Two
On
2012 figures, agriculture accounted for the largest share – about
47% – of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions. Energy use
(excluding transport) accounted for about 24% of emissions and
transport’s contribution was about 19%. However, the largest
sources of emissions
growth in
this country since 1990 have been in transport, which accounted for
40% of the increase in emissions and agriculture about 28% – while
energy (non-transport) emissions was running at 18% followed by
industrial emissions at 14%. Government policy has not seriously
addressed the areas of emissions growth, farm related or otherwise.
In fact, the massive government investment in roading – and the
related use of fossil fuels – has made government a key enabler of
that growth.

As
COP21 kicks off in Paris with tear gas and house arrests it is good
to recall a watershed moment – COP15 in Copenhagen

I
remember COP15, held in Copenhagen in 2009 in the follow-up to the
financial meltdown. I remember watching with horror the coverage on
Democracy Now! - how activists were hunted down by police an
repressed, attendees from the Third World were made to queue for
hours in the the freezing cold while others went home because they
were refused entry to the proceedings.

This
was the first time I saw the ugly side of the world as we have come
to know it since demonstrated in a ‘democratic’ country that
previously had a reputation for tolerance. It is when I lost hope in
anything being ‘done’ about global warming and realised that any
action to combat greenhouse gas emissions was being thrown under the
bus.

It
was also about the time that we began to see the very first postive
feedbacks manifest themselves and climate change enter an abrupt
phase.

COP15
– Copenhagen 2009

COP15
Demonstration Copenhagen Denmark 20091212 Massive Arrest

Our
own Climate Change Negotiations Minister, Tim Groser came back and
attacked the small nations of the Pacific who had tried to defend
their own nations, for ‘scuppering’ agreement while the rich
nations (including New Zealand) decided between themselves to do
nothing

Tuvalu 'Shouting Match' at COP15 in Copenhagen

Barry
Coates - Oxfam New Zealand talks to OneClimate at COP15 in Copenhagen

One
of the most memorable speeches at the time was that of the president
of the Maldives

(From
L) Paul de Clerck (Friends of the Earth International), Dorothy
Guerrero (Focus on the Global South) and Naomi Klein announces
the winner of the Angry Mermaid award on December 15, 2009 at COP15.
Monsanto received 37% of the votesahead
of Royal Dutch Shell 18% and the American Petroleum Institute 14%.

Six
years later, in 2016, Klein serves as the Rockefeller financed
350.org’s most valuable asset. Although Klein awarded Monsanto the
“Angry Mermaid” award in 2009, consider 350.org founded TckTckTck
(GCCA) with partner WWF (and 18 other NGOs) prior to COP15 where the
TckTckTck alliance dominated the international conference grossly
underminingsmall
nations such as Bolivia. WWF’s
alliance with Monsanto is extensively documented. [Photograph:
Olivier Morin/guardian.co.uk]

+++

O

On
the occasion of its ten-year anniversary, the antiglobalization
movement has been brought out of its slumber. This is to be expected,
as anniversaries and nostalgia often trump the here and now in
political action. What is troublesome, though, is not the celebration
of a historical moment but the attempted resurrection of this
movement, known by some as the Global Justice Movement, under the
banner of Climate Justice.

If
only regenerating the zeitgeist of a radical moment was as simple as
substituting ‘Climate’ for ‘Global’; if only movements
appeared with such eas! In fact, this strategy, pursued to its
fullest extent in Copenhagen during the UN COP15 Climate Change
Summit, is proving more damaging than useful to those of us who are,
and have been for the past decade, actively antagonistic to
capitalism and its overarching global structures. Here, we will
attempt to illustrate some of the problematic aspects of the troubled
rebranding of a praxis particular to a decade past. Namely, we will
address the following: the financialization of nature and the
indirect reliance on markets and monetary solutions as catalysts for
structural change, the obfuscation of internal class antagonisms
within states of the Global South in favor of simplistic North-South
dichotomies, and the pacification of militant action resulting from
an alliance forged with transnational NGOs and reformist
environmental groups who have been given minimal access to the halls
of power in exchange for their successful policing of the movement.

Many
of these problematic aspects of the movement’s rebranding became
apparent in Copenhagen during the main, high-profile intellectual
event that was organized by Climate Justice Action (CJA) on December
14 . CJA is a new alliance formed among (but of course not limited
to) some of the Climate Camp activists from the UK, parts of the
Interventionist Left from Germany, non-violent civil disobedience
activists from the US and the Negrist Disobbedienti from Italy.

The
event, which took place in the “freetown” of Christiania,
consisted of the usual suspects: Naomi Klein, Michael Hardt, and CJA
spokesperson Tadzio Mueller, and it was MCed by non-violent activist
guru Lisa Fithian. In their shared political analysis, all of the
speakers emphasized the rebirth of the anti-globalization movement.
But an uncomfortable contradiction was overarching: while the
speakers sought to underscore the continuity with the decade past,
they also presented this summit as different, in that those who came
to protest were to be one with a summit of world nations and
accredited NGOs, instead of presenting a radical critique and
alternative force.

Ecology
as Economy and Nature as Investment Capital

“What’s
important about the discourse that is so powerful, coming from the
Global South right now, about climate debt, is that we know that
economic debt is a tool of domination and enforcement. It is how our
governments impose their neoliberal capitalist policies around the
world, so for the Global South to come to the table and say, ‘Wait
a minute, we are the creditors and you are the debtors, you owe us a
huge debt’ creates an equalizing dynamic in the negotiations.”

Let’s
look at this contemporary notion of debt, highlighted by Naomi Klein
as the principal avenue of struggle for the emerging climate justice
movement. A decade ago, the issue of debt incurred through loans
taken out from the IMF and World Bank was an integral part of the
antiglobalization movement’s analysis and demand to “Drop the
Debt.” Now, some of that era’s more prominent organizers and
thinkers are presenting something deemed analogous and termed
‘climate debt’. The claim is simple: most of the greenhouse gases
have historically been produced by wealthier industrial nations and
since those in the Global South will feel most of its devastating
environmental effects, those countries that created the problem owe
the latter some amount of monetary reparations.

The
idea of climate debt, however, poses two large problems.

First,
while “Drop the Debt!” was one of the slogans of the
antiglobalization movement, the analysis behind it was much more
developed. Within the movement everyone recognized debt as a tool of
capital for implementing neoliberal structural adjustment programs.
Under pressure from piling debt, governments were forced to accept
privatization programs and severe austerity regimes that further
exposed local economies to the ravages of transnational capital. The
idea was that by eliminating this debt, one would not only stop
privatization (or at least its primary enabling mechanism) but also
open up political space for local social movements to take advantage
of. Yet something serious is overlooked in this rhetorical transfer
of the concept of debt from the era of globalization to that of
climate change. Contemporary demands for reparations justified by the
notion of climate debt open a dangerous door to increased green
capitalist investment in the Global South. This stands in contrast to
the antiglobalization movement’s attempts to limit transnational
capital’s advances in these same areas of the world through the
elimination of neoliberal debt.

The
recent emergence of a highly lucrative market formed around climate,
and around carbon in particular cannot be overlooked when we attempt
to understand the implications of climate reparations demands. While
carbon exchanges are the most blatant form of this emerging green
capitalist paradigm, value is being reassigned within many existing
commodity markets based on their supposed impact on the climate.
Everything from energy to agriculture, from cleaning products to
electronics, and especially everything within the biosphere, is being
incorporated into this regime of climate markets. One can only
imagine the immense possibilities for speculation and
financialization in these markets as the green bubble continues to
grow.

The
foreign aid and investment (i.e. development) that will flow into
countries of the Global South as a result of climate debt reparations
will have the effect of directly subsidizing those who seek to profit
off of and monopolize these emerging climate markets. At the
Klimaforum, the alternative forum designed to counter the UN summit,
numerous panels presented the material effects that would result from
a COP15 agreement. In one session on climate change and agricultural
policies in Africa, members of the Africa Biodiversity Network
outlined how governments on the continent were enclosing communally
owned land, labeling it marginal and selling it to companies under
Clean Development Mechanisms (CDMs) for biofuel cultivation. CDMs
were one of the Kyoto Protocol’s arrangements for attracting
foreign investment into the Global South under the guise of reducing
global greenhouse gas emissions. These sorts of green capitalist
projects will continue to proliferate across the globe in conjunction
with aid given under the logic of climate debt and will help to
initiate a new round of capitalist development and accumulation,
displacing more people in the Global South and leading to detrimental
impacts on ecosystems worldwide.

Second
and perhaps more importantly, “Climate Debt” perpetuates a system
that assigns economic and financial value to the biosphere,
ecosystems and in this case a molecule of CO2 (which, in reductionist
science, readily translates into degrees Celsius). “Climate Debt”
is indeed an “equalizing dynamic”, as it infects relations
between the Global North and South with the same logic of
commodification that is central to those markets on which carbon is
traded upon. In Copenhagen, that speculation on the value of CO2
preoccupied governments, NGOs, corporations and many of the activists
organizing the protests. Advertisements for the windmill company
Vestas dominated the metro line in Copenhagen leading to the Bella
Center. After asserting that the time for action is now, they read
“We must find a price for CO2”. Everyone from Vestas to the
Sudanese government to large NGOs agree on this fundamental
principle: that the destruction of nature and its consequences for
humans can be remedied through financial markets and trade deals and
that monetary value can be assigned to ecosystems. This continued
path towards further commodification of nature and climate
debt-driven capitalist development runs entirely antithetical to the
antiglobalization movement that placed at its heart the conviction
that “the world is not for sale!”

The
Inside in the Outside

One
of the banners and chants that took place during the CJA-organized
Reclaim Power demonstration on December 16 was “Whose summit? Our
Summit!”. This confused paradigm was omnipresent in the first
transnational rendezvous of the Climate Justice Movement. Klein
depicted her vision of the street movements’ relationship to those
in power during her speech in Christiania as follows:

“It’s
nothing like Seattle, there are government delegations that are
thinking about joining you. If this turns into a riot, it’s gonna
be a riot. We know this story. I’m not saying it’s not an
interesting story, but it is what it is. It’s only one story. It
will turn into that. So I understand the question about how do we
take care of each other but I disagree that that means fighting the
cops. Never in my life have I ever said that before. [Laughs]. I have
never condemned peoples’ tactics. I understand the rage. I don’t
do this, I’m doing it now. Because I believe something very, very
important is going on, a lot of courage is being shown inside that
center. And people need the support.”

The
concept that those in the streets outside of the summit are supposed
to be part of the same political force as the NGOs and governments
who have been given a seat at the table of summit negotiations was
the main determining factor for the tenor of the actions in
Copenhagen. The bureaucratization of the antiglobalization movement
(or its remnants), with the increased involvement from NGOs and
governments, has been a process that manifested itself in World
Social Forums and Make Poverty History rallies. Yet in Copenhagen,
NGOs were much more than a distracting sideshow. They formed a
constricting force that blunted militant action and softened radical
analysis through paternalism and assumed representation of whole
continents.

In
Copenhagen, the movement was asked by these newly empowered managers
of popular resistance to focus solely on supporting actors within the
UN framework, primarily leaders of the Global South and NGOs, against
others participating in the summit, mainly countries of the Global
North. Nothing summarizes this orientation better than the
embarrassingly disempowering Greenpeace slogans “Blah Blah Blah,
Act Now!” and “Leaders Act!” Addressing politicians rather than
ordinary people, the attitude embodied in these slogans is one of
relegating the respectable force of almost 100,000 protesters to the
role of merely nudging politicians to act in the desired direction,
rather than encouraging people to act themselves. This is the logic
of lobbying. No display of autonomous, revolutionary potential.
Instead, the emphasis is on a mass display of obedient petitioning.
One could have just filled out Greenpeace membership forms at home to
the same effect.

A
big impetus in forging an alliance with NGOs lay in the activists’
undoubtedly genuine desire to be in solidarity with the Global South.
But the unfortunate outcome is that a whole hemisphere has been
equated with a handful of NGO bureaucrats and allied government
leaders who do not necessarily have the same interests as the members
of the underclasses in the countries that they claim to represent. In
meeting after meeting in Copenhagen where actions were to be planned
around the COP15 summit, the presence of NGOs who work in the Global
South was equated with the presence of the whole of the Global South
itself. Even more disturbing was the fact that most of this rhetoric
was advanced by white activists speaking for NGOs, which they posed
as speaking on behalf of the Global South.

Klein
is correct in this respect: Copenhagen really was nothing like
Seattle. The most promising elements of the praxis presented by the
antiglobalization movement emphasized the internal class antagonisms
within all nation-states and the necessity of building militant
resistance to local capitalist elites worldwide. Institutions such as
the WTO and trade agreements such as NAFTA were understood as parts
of a transnational scheme aimed at freeing local elites and financial
capital from the confines of specific nation-states so as to enable a
more thorough pillaging of workers and ecosystems across the globe.
Ten years ago, resistance to transnational capital went hand in hand
with resistance to corrupt governments North and South that were
enabling the process of neoliberal globalization. Its important to
note that critical voices such as Evo Morales have been added to the
chorus of world leaders since then. However, the movement’s current
focus on climate negotiations facilitated by the UN is missing a
nuanced global class analysis. It instead falls back on a simplistic
North-South dichotomy that mistakes working with state and NGO
bureaucrats from the Global South for real solidarity with grassroots
social movements struggling in the most exploited and oppressed areas
of the world.

Enforced
Homogeneity of Tactics

Aligning
the movement with those working inside the COP15 summit not only had
an effect on the politics in the streets but also a serious effect on
the tactics of the actions. The relationship of the movement to the
summit was one of the main points of discussion about a year ago
while Climate Justice Action was being formed. NGOs who were part of
the COP15 process argued against taking an oppositional stance
towards the summit in its entirety, therefore disqualifying a
strategy such as a full shutdown of the summit. The so-called
inside/outside strategy arose from this process, and the main action,
where people from the inside and the outside would meet in a parking
lot outside of the summit for an alternative People’s Assembly, was
planned to highlight the supposed political unity of those
participating in the COP15 process and those who manifested a radical
presence in the streets.

Having
made promises to delegates inside the Bella Center on behalf of the
movement, Naomi Klein asserted that “Anybody who escalates is not
with us,” clearly indicating her allegiances. Rather than
reentering the debate about the validity of ‘escalating’ tactics
in general, arguing whether or not they are appropriate for this
situation in particular, or attempting to figure out a way in which
different tactics can operate in concert, the movement in Copenhagen
was presented with oppressive paternalism disguised as a tactical
preference for non-violence.

The
antiglobalization movement attempted to surpass the eternal and
dichotomizing debate about violence vs. non-violence by recognizing
the validity of a diversity of tactics. But in Copenhagen, a move was
made on the part of representatives from Climate Justice Action to
shut down any discussion of militant tactics, using the excuse of the
presence of people (conflated with NGOs) from the Global South.
Demonstrators were told that any escalation would put these people in
danger and possibly have them banned from traveling back to Europe in
the future. With any discussion of confrontational and militant
resistance successfully marginalized, the thousands of protesters who
arrived in Copenhagen were left with demonstrations dictated by the
needs and desires of those participating in and corroborating the
summit.

Alongside
the accreditation lines that stretched around the summit, UN banners
proclaimed “Raise Your Voice,” signifying an invitation to
participate for those willing to submit to the logic of NGO
representation. As we continue to question the significance of NGO
involvement and their belief that they are able to influence global
decision-making processes, such as the COP15 summit, we must
emphasize that these so-called participatory processes are in fact
ones of recuperative pacification. In Copenhagen, like never before,
this pacification was not only confined to the summit but was
successfully extended outward into the demonstrations via movement
leaders aligned with NGOs and governments given a seat at the table
of negotiations. Those who came to pose a radical alternative to the
COP15 in the streets found their energy hijacked by a logic that
prioritized attempts to influence the failing summit, leaving street
actions uninspired, muffled and constantly waiting for the promised
breakthroughs inside the Bella Center that never materialized.

NGO
anger mounted when a secondary pass was implemented to enter the
summit during the finalfour days, when presidents and prime ministers
were due to arrive. Lost in confusion, those demonstrating on the
outside were first told that their role was to assist the NGOs on the
inside and then were told that they were there to combat the
exclusion of the NGOs from the summit. This demand not to be excluded
from the summit became the focal politic of the CJA action on
December 16. Although termed Reclaim Power, this action actually
reinforced the summit, demanding “voices of the excluded to be
heard.” This demand contradicted the fact that a great section of
the Bella Center actually resembled an NGO Green Fair for the
majority of the summit. It is clear that exclusionary participation
is a structural part of the UN process and while a handful of NGOs
were “kicked out” of the summit after signing on to Reclaim
Power, NGO participation was primarily limited due to the simple fact
that three times as many delegates were registered than the Bella
Center could accommodate.

In
the end, the display of inside/outside unity that the main action on
the 16th attempted to manifest was a complete failure and never
materialized. The insistence on strict non-violence prevented any
successful attempt on the perimeter fence from the outside while on
the inside the majority of the NGO representatives who had planned on
joining the People’s Assembly were quickly dissuaded by the threat
of arrest. The oppressive insistence by CJA leaders that all energy
must be devoted to supporting those on the inside who could
successfully influence the outcome of the summit resulted in little
to no gains as the talks sputtered into irreconcilable antagonisms
and no legally binding agreement at the summit’s close. An
important opportunity to launch a militant movement with the
potential to challenge the very foundations of global ecological
collapse was successfully undermined leaving many demoralized and
confused.

Looking
Forward: The Real Enemy

As
we grapple with these many disturbing trends that have arisen as
primary tendencies defining the climate justice movement, we have no
intention of further fetishizing the antiglobalization movement and
glossing over its many shortcomings. Many of the tendencies we
critique here were also apparent at that time. What is important to
take away from comparisons between these two historical moments is
that those in leadership positions within the contemporary movement
that manifested in Copenhagen have learned all the wrong lessons from
the past. They have discarded the most promising elements of the
antiglobalization struggles: the total rejection of all market and
commodity-based solutions, the focus on building grassroots
resistance to the capitalist elites of all nation-states, and an
understanding that diversity of tactics is a strength of our
movements that needs to be encouraged.

The
problematic tendencies outlined above led to a disempowering and
ineffective mobilization in Copenhagen.Looking back, it is clear that
those of us who traveled to the Copenhagen protests made great
analytical and tactical mistakes. If climate change and global
ecological collapse are indeed the largest threats facing our world
today, then the most important front in this struggle must be against
green capitalism. Attempting to influence the impotent and stumbling
UN COP15 negotiations is a dead end and waste of energy when capital
is quickly reorganizing to take advantage of the ‘green revolution’
and use it as a means of sustaining profits and solidifying its
hegemony into the future.

Instead
of focusing on the clearly bankrupt and stumbling summit happening at
the Bella Center, we should have confronted the hyper-green
capitalism of Hopenhagen, the massive effort of companies such as
Siemens, Coca-Cola, Toyota and Vattenfall to greenwash their image
and the other representations of this market ideology within the city
center. In the future, our focus must be on destroying this
reorganized and rebranded form of capitalism that is successfully
manipulating concerns over climate change to continue its
uninterrupted exploitation of people and the planet for the sake of
accumulation. At our next rendezvous we also need to seriously
consider if the NGO/non-profit industrial complex has become a
hindrance rather than a contribution to our efforts and thus a
parasite that must be neutralized before it can undermine future
resistance.

COP21
From An Absurdist Point Of View

There
have been many analytical articles addressing the role of upcoming
climate change negotiations in Paris (COP21), but it seems regarding
it as a Theatre of the Absurd is perhaps one way to maintain one’s
sanity at such times. That said, here is my contribution of likely
scenes:

David
Cameron will bike from
his hotel, preceded and followed by armored limousines carrying his
aides, security and materials.

Al
Gore will give a speech, broadcast to Syrian refugee camps,
explaining that climate change is the most imminent global threat,
and therefore funds will be diverted from the UN High Commissioner
for Refugees to pay for the purchase of electric vehicles by rich
Californians.

Delegates
will refuse to drink Perrier, and hold up the proceedings until Fiji
water is flown in.

Leonardo
di Caprio will jet in from his Palm
Springs mansion with
his entourage, to encourage the world to live a simpler lifestyle.

Every
time the names “Exxon” or “Koch” is uttered, horses all over
Paris will whinny, as in Frau Blucher (Young Frankenstein).

An
award will be given to the protester with the best costume: a
drowning polar bear mauling a topless woman.

A
group of unheralded academics will meet on the sidelines and develop
a rational, workable proposal for reducing GHG emissions and be
totally ignored.

Printing
the conference proceedings will prove profitable as the company
receives carbon credits for the paper used. The carbon effect of
flying them home in delegates’ luggage will be ignored, especially
since most will be left in hotel rooms.

A
standing ovation will honor Haitian peasants for embracing a biomass
lifestyle. An award made out of mud from a deforested hillside will
be created for future presentations.

The
Pope will offer indulgences to anyone buying an electric car. Tesla
Motors will introduce three new models: Inferno ($35k), Purgatorio
($50k) and Paradiso ($95k). Sales slogan: “It is easier for a camel
to pass through a needle than a rich man to enter heaven, unless he
drives a Tesla!”[/entity]

Probably,
the happiest people involved will be the African immigrants who are
(allegedly) the source of most marijuana sales in Paris. And of
course their customers.

Finally,
the meeting will conclude with delegates pronouncing it a complete
success in that none of them is blamed for climate change and all
have agreed that someone else should pay to fix the problem.

Today Kevin Hester and I had the honour to have a discussion with New Zealand climate scientist, Dr. Jim Salinger.

Here are some comments from Kevin

Today
30/11/2015, I had the honour of interviewing, alongside Robin
Westenra, Dr Jim Salinger, who I consider to be NZ’s pre-eminent
climate scientist, on the subject of Abrupt Climate Change.

Dr
Salinger is the honorary academic at Auckland University’s School
of Environment and has been a lead author for the IPCC, was a member
of the Nobel Prize-winning team and spent 30 years with N.I.W.A.. the
National Institute of Water and Atmosphere and the NZ Met Service.

The
opportunity to interview Dr Salinger stemmed from the question I
posed to him in the Q & A of a public seminar in Hamilton inappropriately named

"The Greatest Climate Change Show on
Earth" on the 12 of November 2015

I
posed the question to the panel “ When are we going to start
conceding that we are now in abrupt climate change”? Dr Salinger
replied “ I will answer that gentleman’s question and the answer
is now, we are in abrupt climate change.”

This
is I believe, a seminal moment in New Zealand climate science history
when such a respected scientist publically speaks so frankly.

The
significance of the word ‘Abrupt’ cannot be underestimated and
brings into question the subject of ‘Climate Tipping Points’ and
how rapidly they will tip the biosphere into a level of chaos that
will make the current climate disruption seem like “ The Good Old
Days”.

My
own position with regard to our climate catastrophe is that we are
past “ The point of no return” as our polar ice caps are melting
in an unstoppable death spiral, faster than previously thought with
huge quantities of methane being released from both the permafrost,
the sub-marine clathrate deposits and remarkably from peat bogs
burning in Siberia and the 11,000 forest fires currently burning in
Indonesia which are emitting more carbon than the USA which before
these fires were deliberately started was the world’s 2nd largest
emitter. The Indonesian fires alone are the equivalent of the second
largest country in terms of emissions on this planet appearing out of
nowhere, whilst we have 8.5 million acres burning in America alone
and millions of acres burning uncontrollably in Siberia.

Abrupt
climate change is now upon us and we need to do Everything within our
power to reduce our emissions which brings us to the issue of the
Trans Pacific Partnership agreement.

If
the government of John Key were to sign the TPPA we would be
severely exposed to legal action under the Investor disputes clause
which would leave us open to legal action in overseas tribunals if we
instigated emission controls that could be deemed to breach the
agreement or the rights of the corporations behind it.

I
brought up the subject of deep sea drilling and whether we should
have a moratorium on deep sea drilling and Dr Salinger agreed and in
answer to my question agreed that it could possibly destabilise
the sub-marine clathrates.

Also
discussed was the issue of Nuclear being promoted at Cop 21 in Paris
as a solution to climate change and to paraphrase Albert Einstein “
If the answer is nuclear power it must have been a stupid question.
Nuclear is a stupid way to boil water”

It
is now time for our politicians of every ‘stripe’ to discuss
abrupt climate change and for NGO’s like Greenpeace, Oxfam, 350.org
et al to all accept the significance of this new paradigm and to
prepare accordingly which to date they have all avoided.

Dr
Salinger has graciously agreed to be re-interviewed in the coming
months where we will recap the outcome of the Paris talks and update
what I now refer to as The Great Unraveling.

This
is a photo of myself and Dr Salinger on the recent climate change
march in Auckland.

The
world is now in abrupt climate change, says a New Zealander who was
one of the first scientists in the world to talk about human-induced
climate change.

And
as the world’s leaders head to Paris for talks over a new climate
treaty, Dr Jim Salinger is instead putting his faith in ordinary
people.

Abrupt
climate change refers to substantial climate changes over a short
period of time. Salinger says that the current frequency of droughts
and storms once classed one-in-a-hundred-year events says to him that
the world has now entered abrupt climate change.

"We’ve
probably been in it since 2010,” he told Carbon News.

Salinger
came across the fact that the world was warming almost by accident in
the 1970s. For his PhD, he analysed New Zealand’s climate records,
expecting to find, in line with the thinking of the day, evidence
that the world was slowly moving toward another ice age.

But
his finding that the climate was, in fact, warming, led to
post-doctoral research at the University of East Anglia, and the
publication of scientific papers.

Initially,
the discussion was largely academic, but by 1990 it was becoming
“pretty clear” that, left unchecked, climate change would be
disastrous for humans and the world as they knew it, he says.

Now
honorary academic at Auckland University’s School of Environment,
Salinger has been a lead author for the IPCC (and was a member of the
Nobel Prize-winning team) and spent 30 years with the National
Institute of Water and Atmosphere (Niwa), and the Met Service.

With
such a background, you would think that he would be a certainty for
the COP21 (Conference of the Parties) talks in Paris, but he says he
has never taken part in any of the COP talks because he has little
faith in the ability of politicians to do what needs to be done.

Instead,
he focuses on helping the public to understand what is happening.

“I’m
keen on talking to the people in the streets,” he said. “It’s
got to start at the grass roots. If we can get enough action at the
grass roots, they will put pressure on the politicians.”

So
he spends as much time as he can talking at public meetings, such as
the recent Greatest Show on Earth panel in Hamilton.

The
science behind climate change isn’t difficult to understand, he
says, when it’s explained properly, and he believes that public
acceptance is growing.

“Definitely
today, compared with five years ago, there’s much more acceptance
of the science,” he said.

That
doesn’t mean, however, that everybody accepts it; Salinger has been
the target of groups trying to discredit the science of climate
change.

He
says he deals with it by trying to remain calm and rational, and by
allowing the science to speak for itself.

And
despite the fact he – possibly more than any other New Zealander –
understands just how close the world is to unliveable climate
changes, Salinger remains optimistic that the world will act in time
to avoid the worst impacts.

“There
is always hope,” he said. “People need to think what steps they
are taking that will add up to a much larger action. Everybody has to
be in the tent.”

But
with the latest science showing that the world has warmed by an
average 1deg since 1850, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere now at 400 parts per million (scientists had recommended
not exceeding 350ppm), there is no time to waste, Salinger says.